I am currently researching the transmission of Iberian geographic knowledge into English cartography, specifically how Portuguese toponyms may have found their way onto the Molyneux globe of 1592. One ...

The majority of the images used in this site come from the vast image collections of the Royal Museums, Greenwich. They can be searched in their entirety here.

With the invasion of Portugal (1807) during the Napoleonic War and French designs on the Portuguese Far East Empire, the British, under the energetic leadership of Lord Minto, Governor General of ...

WW1 interrupted the education of significant numbers of young men who served in the armed forces. At the cessation of hostilities the Royal Navy decided to do something to redress the matter. In early ...

Born in 1733, Alexander Brodie prospered as a master-blacksmith making fire-grates and register stoves. He designed a new and safer firehearth for ships; two large boilers over a fire-grate, ...

Continuing from his Note in MM Volume 2, Issue 3 Vaughan provides earlier written evidence of the general use of ‘port’ when instructing the helmsman to steer to the left. In his 1644 ‘Seaman’s ...

Writing in his Glossaire Nautique, concerning various ancient pictures of ships of unnamed types that had come under his observation, Jal describes one, not illustrated by him, in terms equivalent to ...

A brief report is presented on the discovery in 1974 of the prow of a Carthaginian warship on the sea floor north of Marsala, Sicily. The discovery complements the stern of the ‘Punic Ship’ found in ...

This short article tells the story of the Englishman Francis Sheldon. Between 1658 and 1692, he built ships in Sweden, Denmark, England and Ireland, mainly in Sweden. He spent twenty years there, ...

The use of the wheel to activate a ship’s rudder via the tiller came into use in the early 1700’s, in England, France and later Venetia. The essential problem was to translate the rotary motion of the ...

This paper describes the development of the Bidston Hill signal station overlooking the entrances to the port of Liverpool, which was completed in 1771. Its purpose was to give shipowners as much ...